Nothing I love more then a inter promotional Japanese brawl. Team NOAH is undermanned and are awesome fighting from below. Serious Inoue is great, he is such a shlub, and I love it when he steps it up and goes to war. The Yasuda experiment was a pretty huge turn of the century failure, but this was his crowning achievement, he is a great bully smacking around Inoue with sumo thrusts and chucking him to the ground. In one of the cooler moments Yasuda has Inoue mounted and Honda runs in and chucks him with his awesome german suplex. Finish was totally boss, Hashimoto is a serial killer in this, he comes in a demolishes Inoue with these brutal looking over hand chops, they have to stop the match because his shoulder is so damaged. Has everything you want in this kind of match, bad feelings, great character work and big time violence.

I went back and watched this and sad to say, I wasn't blown away by it. I dug the early stuff with Inoue going after Hash and Yasuda doing the sumo vs. amateur showdown against Honda. But I thought it lost steam as it went on, and the finish really fell flat. If you're going to have an angry Hash beat Inoue into a stoppage, great. Instead, the ref called the match with Yasuda lying on top of Inoue, and the crowd didn't seem to get it at all. Still thought it was a good match because Hash and Honda are awesome, but I wasn't feeling it as a MOTYC. Hash must have 100 better matches in his career, including every single tag from the WAR feud.

Yeah, I'm more in line with Childs here. I thought this was okay -- the stuff between Hashimoto and Inoue was easily the most interesting interactions. Honda headbutting Hashimoto was cool, and Inoue's selling was pretty great, whether it was getting punched in the throat by Yasuda or chopped down by Hashimoto. The finish sucked though.